Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cetus (Cet)  ·  Contains:  NGC 1055
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Starship Enterprise (NGC-1055), KuriousGeorge
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Starship Enterprise (NGC-1055)

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Starship Enterprise (NGC-1055), KuriousGeorge
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Starship Enterprise (NGC-1055)

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Description

When my artistic wife first saw this image, she thought it looked like the Starship Enterprise. So I'll call it that here. 

I quickly visited this distant galaxy several years ago after being inspired by the APOD image taken with the 8.2m Subaru Telescope...

NGC 1055 in Subaru telescope
Quick visit in 2018 using Planewave CDK24

I finally had a chance to re-visit this year. It took nearly a week to capture 7 hours of Luminance with average FWHM of 2" in a 21.3 SQM sky. With an additional 12 hours of RGB (4 hours in each channel) I'm much happier with this 2x Drizzle result. (-:

"Spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is located 60 million light-year away. Seen edge-on, this island universe spans over 100,000 light-years, a little larger than our own Milky Way. The colorful stars in the foreground are well within our own Milky Way. The telltale pinkish star forming regions are scattered through winding dust lanes along the distant galaxy's thin disk. With a smattering of even more distant background galaxies, this deep image also reveals a boxy halo that extends far above and below the central bulge and disk of NGC 1055. The halo itself is laced with faint, narrow structures, and could represent the mixed and spread out debris from a satellite galaxy disrupted by the larger spiral some 10 billion years ago."

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Starship Enterprise (NGC-1055), KuriousGeorge